


Hapalochlaena lunulata cecum howardii

by apiphile



Category: The Used
Genre: Crack, Dare, Drugs, Other, Tentacles, anatomy-fail, traumatising swear_jar, were-character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-15
Updated: 2010-03-15
Packaged: 2017-10-08 00:26:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/70822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A decision made to protect the band turns out to be the wrong one, but with potentially pleasant results. If Dan can get over how weird it is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hapalochlaena lunulata cecum howardii

**Author's Note:**

> Another story written primarily to fuck with swear_jar on LJ.

Long shadows were knifing through the upstairs rooms from the setting California sun by the time they got back from a long day in the basement studio. Dan stretched and stretched until his shoulder popped, and then did it again a few more times until Bert screwed up his face. "What are you gonna do when it comes out and starts wriggling around on the floor?"

"Grow a new one?" Quinn suggested, rubbing the side of his sneaker against the floor to get it straight again. A piece of rubber came off the sole.

"Get a robot arm," Dan corrected. "With extra squeezing grip for squeezing. Squeeeeezing." He reached behind him and grabbed Jepha by the waist as he tried to shuffle past. "ROBODAN. Shhh_clunk_." His fingers tightened on Jepha's belly until Jepha frowned and squirmed.

"Don't you break _enough_ drumsticks, Kong?" He made no actual move to remove Dan's hand and eventually it was Bert who pushed it away.

"Maybe a robot arm with a drumstick on the end," Quinn suggested, scooping up Jepha's hat and dropping it on his head as if he hadn't just taken it off five seconds ago to straighten his hair.

"Yeah. Dan has no other use for his arm," Bert said in clear defiance of Dan squeezing at Jepha's hip again. "He can pick noses with it too."

"He'd get boogers on the drumkit," Quinn pointed out.

"My boogers are already on his drumkit."

Dan let go of Jepha and stuck his index finger up his nose. "Was that a hint?"

Bert just grinned and held out both his palms like Oliver begging for more while Quinn made pointed _I am very hungry and we have been here all fucking day and you promised me Chinese food Bert you asshole_ mimes to no avail.

After a minute of protracted digging Dan produced a rather pathetic specimen and wiped it over Bert's palms like a pygmy slug. He gave Bert an apologetic smug. "Not enough air pollution."

"It's black," Jepha pointed out.

Bert picked it up between scabbed thumb and bitten forefinger and examined it closely. "You suck, Dan. You suck suck asses in sucksville. You are the entire population of the land of Suck." He squashed the booger flat, rolled it into a ball, and shoved it up his own nose. "You are the crown prince of Suckdonia. You are Captain Suckass of Suckistan."

"_You're_ between me and food," Quinn said crossly, "fucking leave."

* * *

 

After nearly dying of Quinn's driving a few times, and Jepha making them stop twice to find somewhere that sold _good_ tea, they stretched out across the acres of ugly purple tie-dyed throws that colonised the borrowed band house, reeking of pot and splattered with unevenly-painted yin-yangs.

"How are you still eating?" Dan muttered as Bert took another red-printed white carton of rice out of his unresisting hands with a greedy grab, and shoved a spoon into it. Why Bert used a spoon when everyone else at least made the effort to grapple with chopsticks was another of those McCracken Mysteries that was simply too time-consuming to bother with solving. "How are you still eating food? Where does it go?"

Quinn, lying on his back and groaning, his jeans unbuttoned and his back angled weirdly over an obstacle course of cushions, threw his arm out to prod Bert in the potbelly. "He has a black hole."

"In his ass," Jepha said, curled into a little tattooed pill of a bassist in a high-backed chair that looked like it had been rescued from either a movie set or a dumpster, his cartons carefully pressed into his thighs and a set of chopsticks in his hand complementing the ones sticking up out of the back of his baseball cap like antenna. He dropped a noodle on his own foot.

"In his belly," Quinn poked Bert again, and Bert picked up an unused chopstick from the floor and stabbed him in the back of the hand. Barely pausing, Bert shovelled another mouthful of rice in, then sprayed it back over Quinn's shirt. "Oh, you're going to eat that back off."

"Bert McCracken, human vacuum cleaner," Dan said, "I feel enlightened."

"I feel fucking taxidermied," Quinn groaned, holding his free hand over his stomach.

"That's what enlightenment feels like," Jepha said with a smirk, dropping his chopsticks on the floor. "Oh. My fucking god. I am so enlightened."

"I'm so enlightened I'm going to take a dump that could sink the fucking Titanic," Quinn said, moving only to settle further into the cushions.

Bert stole the carton from next to his head and began wolfing that down as well.

Dan's eyes began to droop closed and as the snuffling, doglike sounds of Bert chowing down on chow mein faded into the swish of passing cars and the distant scream and yelp of sirens he fell asleep where he sat, half-propped against a thing that was apparently called an Ottoman.

It was dark and kind of slightly cold when Dan woke up feeling like all the food in the world had settled in his stomach like a bowling ball and forced all the beer in the world into his bladder. He got up quietly, tripped over Bert's leg, swore, and stumbled through the mish-mash of dumpster-furnishing and ashtrays to where he vaguely remembered the bathroom to be.

No one had managed to move the bathroom while he was asleep. Dan shoved the door open with his elbow, already trying to wrestle his dick out of his jeans without really having the fingers for dealing with a zipper just yet. He blinked at the cold, odd light of the full moon filtering in through the frosted glass window and, as he got a focus on the room, nearly swallowed his own tongue.

"FUCK."

He couldn't really process what he was seeing at first. It looked a bit like one of Jepha's tattoos had climbed off his body, but after blinking some more and shaking his head several times like a cartoon parody of himself he realised that wasn't it at all. Maybe it was some sort of head-eating alien. Or a demon thing that had come up from the sewer. Or maybe.

Dan put a hand up to the doorway. Maybe he was hallucinating.

The thing perched on the toilet seat that mostly looked like an octopus except for the tattoos, the eye-watering piercings, the baseball cap and the unmistakeable sense of being Jepha Howard … waved a tentacle at him.

Two thoughts ran very quickly and noisily through Dan's head, waving their arms and shouting urgently. One was _oh my god he's a were-octopus_ and the other was _I must protect the rest of the band_.

Without pause for thought of personal safety or sanity, or even how much he disliked seafood on a normal day, Dan unhinged his lower jaw and lunged forwards, picking up the octopus with both hands and stuffing it into his maw with all the force he could manage. It was huge, but the nature of the octopus is that such creatures can contract an alarming amount and so despite a sensation of suffocating the invertebrate went down with a surprising lack of resistance. Dan shoved the remaining tentacles in past his teeth and clamped his jaw shut, trying not to retch at the sensation of the living, slimy skin as it slithered over his tongue. He nearly lost the battle as a sucker slapped him in the uvula, nearly gave in to his gag reflex, but with an almighty _swallow_ the were-octopus was gone, and Dan was alone in the room.

Which was when he discovered that, perhaps not unsurprisingly, he no longer really needed to pee.

Dan limped back to the living room with his thighs akimbo and his jeans chafing on his balls, and as soon as he got there he gave up and peeled them off. Bert sniffled in his sleep; Dan sat down and almost immediately felt his stomach squirm.

It was very definitely a _squirm_ and not a churn, too. He could see shapes moving under the skin, ill-defined by the low light but unmistakeable as the bloated sensation shifted down the length of his abdomen.

"Fuck," Dan whispered again, absorbing the magnitude of the situation only in degrees. He'd _liked_ Jepha, damn it. He had no call to just… go right ahead and turn out to be an unimaginable horror from beyond the depths of … wherever it was were-octopuses came from … the vast distances between the stars or the bottoms of some dimension of pure evil and crab-bait. There was probably a specific _type_ of hell you went to if you'd let a were-octopus blow you when you were stoned.

The squirming moved further down his body. Dan wondered if he ought to be feeling scared.

"Why aren't you wearing any pants?" Quinn asked suddenly, apparently wide-awake.

Dan jumped and stared at him. "I pissed in 'em."

"Good one." Quinn yawned and kicked one of his sneakers off – the other one had already fallen off his foot – before squinting at Dan's half-naked body in the low light. "You look like you're gonna shit yourself."

"I think I might," Dan said in a horrified voice.

"Not in _here_."

Dan's guts squirmed again. He put his hand over them protectively, like by holding them down he could somehow prevent the tentacled monstrosity from bursting out and maybe devouring Bert and Quinn after it had ripped a hole in his body.

"Seriously if you're going to get explosive diarrhoea do it on the can," Quinn muttered, staring at him suspiciously. "Unless I'm about to get the shits too, and then you can fuck off out of my way."

"It's not the food," Dan managed, closing his eyes briefly as something bulged in his lower abdomen.

There was a sleepy groan and Bert sat up, stiff as a mummy rising from the tomb. He rubbed sleep-spit off the side of his face and stared about him for a minute before flinging a chopstick at Quinn. "What's going on? Why's Dan pantsless? And where's Jepha?"

"Um," Dan said, still holding his belly in with both hands, "I have some potentially. Weird. News."

To his surprise they didn't call him crazy, or a fuckass, or a crazy fuckass, or throw sneakers and old Chinese food cartons of at him. They just stared at him while he explained, the bathroom and the octopus with the tattoos and the waving and the thing where he'd bravely faced his dislike of sashimi and swallowed the evil beast in order to save them all and the bit where he now felt like he was about to possibly have a molluscian assbaby.

When he'd reached the end of his explanation, Quinn and Bert exchanged a look, eyes glittering wetly in the city night lights from the window, and Bert said crossly, "You _ate_ Jepha."

Dan pressed gently on his belly. Something was definitely going on in there. He was starting to feel a bit better, but still a little bloated, like something was pressing at his guts. "I thought he might—"

Quinn sighed. "C'mon, how long have you known Jepha? When would he do something to harm the band?"

Dan said, quite reasonably to his mind, "Yes, but I also didn't know he was a were-octopus."

"He's not a _were_ octopus," Bert corrected, picking his nose. "He's a very normal octopus. It's freaky how many people don't seem to notice."

"He's very good at disguise," Quinn pointed out, smacking Bert in the arm. "Give the guy some credit."

"And what good's that shit done? Now Dan's _eaten_ him." Bert smacked Quinn back. "Where're we going to find a bassist that good? How many other octopus bassists are there?" He chewed on his knuckle for a minute. "We should call John."

Dan's guts twisted of their own apparent accord and a slightly echoy but apparently none the worse for being swallowed voice drifted out into the room. It sounded a lot like Jepha. "Hey, don't replace me."

Bert rushed across the room like a small scruffy torpedo and shoved his ear against Dan's stomach like he was listening for a baby's heartbeat. Normally accustomed to any level of weirdness from Bert, Dan was _slightly_ mindful of being pantless and of how close Bert's face was to his dick. His dick helpfully made the situation a little easier by turning into a nervously-shrivelled peanut and skulking somewhere between his thighs.

"JEPHA?" Bert screamed in a voice that could probably have woken the dead if, this being LA, the dead weren't already awake and getting botox to improve their wrinkly-ass faces. "ARE YOU OKAY?"

There was disconcerting rumble in Dan's guts again and a weird but not entirely horrible vibration, kind of like sitting on a washing machine at the end of its cycle, and Jepha said, "I'm fine, just don't fucking replace me!"

"I don't know, Jepha," Quinn tried to shove Bert away from Dan's abdomen without much success, and Bert smacked his head on Dan's ribs.

"_Ow_," Dan muttered, aware that complaining out loud wouldn't exactly be greeted with a lot of sympathy. He had, after all, eaten the bassist. The injustice of this all, that he'd done it out of a genuine desire to save the band from possible cephalopod-engineered destruction, was going to be overlooked no matter what.

"You can't perform in there," Quinn went on, slapping Bert away again. Bert bit him. "OW. Get off, I'm trying to –"

"He _could_," Bert snapped, shoving Quinn.

Dan was getting increasingly more tempted to cross his legs. This was the kind of fight that he desperately didn't want happening in such close proximity to his naked balls. And what if one of them hit his stomach and knocked Jepha?

The idea was strange, but there was a weird protective flush around it, like … like … Dan tried not to think _like a pregnant woman_ because if his evening got much more weird he might have to pass out to retain brain function. Although Bert would probably say he didn't really need his brain to drum.

"Jepha, get out of there," Quinn said, poking Dan in the gut hard enough to hurt. "You can't play bass from inside the drummer."

"I like it in here!" Jepha said cheerfully, and Dan's lower body buzzed again. Bloating aside, it was actually kind of pleasant. Although he didn't want to think about what was going to happen if he wanted to actually, like, eat something.

"You could shove the bass up Dan's ass," Bert exclaimed, stumbling backwards. Dan became very grateful, very quickly, that their instruments were still at the studio.

"No you could _not_!" Dan shouted, trying to back away without actually falling off the seat. Fortunately, while Bert was giving him a terrifyingly speculative look and grinning demonically, Quinn just shook his head.

"Wouldn't fit. Maybe it if was Jepha's ass…"

"I heard that," Jepha said from inside Dan, and Dan's thighs went a little bit less tense. "I have very good muscle control."

"Just because you can _stop_ it going up there doesn't mean it wouldn't fit, you enormous slut," Bert giggled, sitting down on a cushion with a thump and reaching for his stash with automatic fingers. The whole _middle of the night and humongous crisis_ thing wasn't going to come between Bert and smoking up.

"If it was Jepha's ass though it'd have to be the drum kit," Quinn said thoughtfully, sitting back down next to Bert and watching his speedy fingers with narrowed, greedy eyes. "Would a drum kit fit up Jepha's ass?"

"The whole world could fit up Jepha's ass," Bert said, stifling a yawn with the back of his hand. "Who says it'd have to be the drumkit? Maybe Jepha'd swallow _you_. Or me. Hey, Jepha, you'd swallow me, wouldn't you? I bet I taste nicest."

"I'm not swallowing anyone," Jepha said, and Dan tried to redistribute his weight so Jephas's voice vibrating in his lower body didn't make his balls tickle and buzz against the seat like that. He was beginning to wish he'd kept his pants _on_, piss-stained crotch or whatever. "That was the _point_."

"That's not what I heard," Bert snickered, apropos of apparently nothing.

"Yeah so about this thing where I have an octopus in my guts," Dan said pointedly, worried that the conversation was drifting away from what felt was the very, very important central problem.

"Appendix," Jepha corrected, and Dan's lower body settled further into the chair almost without him willing it to. There was a squirm which straddled the line between "horrific" and "really upsettingly kind of comforting" from the lower bits of Dan's belly, and Jepha added, "I'm in your appendix now, you're not using that, right?"

"But it's tiny," Dan baulked.

"Er, not any more," Jepha said, and there was an apologetic note to the vibrations this time. Dan eyed the slight bulge in his normally quite flat belly with some annoyance while Bert and Quinn shrieked with laughter at this revelation. "Is that okay?"

"What am I going to do, _stop_ you?"

"He could crawl out," Quinn suggested, batting Bert in the hand with a lighter. "Out of your mouth."

"Won't he be all, like, covered in poop?" Bert snatched up the lighter and squinted to bring the end of his blunt into focus. "Ew. Imagine this poopy octopus crawling out of your mouth."

"Fuck you, you've put worse things _in_ your mouth," Jepha said, uncharacteristically huffy. Dan grabbed at the arm of the chair and squeezed it to steady himself.

"Shut up," he muttered in the back of his throat. "Shut _up_."

"Would it even be poop, though?" Quinn asked, watching the cherry glow as Bert puffed the blunt into fiery life. "Is it still poop if you haven't pooped it yet?" He rubbed his forehead blearily. "Or is it something… I don't know. What's poop before you poop it?"

"Food?" Bert suggested, blowing smoke over proceedings. "I'm pretty sure it's still poop when it's inside your ass, Quinn."

"So where does it stop being food and start being poop? Cuz it's … like … puke when it's in your stomach…" Quinn accepted the blunt from Bert with frowning solemnity, obviously set for a night of increasingly stoned attempts to unravel the mysteries of the human digestive system. Dan sighed.

"Well if it's puke when it's in your stomach then if Jepha climbs out of his mouth he'll be all … covered in puke instead," Bert said, like this somehow wasn't as bad. "And Dan will have poop in his stomach."

"Thanks," Dan muttered.

"Poop in your stomach," Bert sang, scratching his nose, "Poop in your stomach, poop—"

"I refer you to the _three_ occasions I've seen you eat poop," Quinn said in a pretend-British accent that was about as convincing as his pretend-Australian, his pretend-Texas, his pretend-Indian, and his pretend-Chinese, and sounded about the same as _all of them_. "And the doubtless countless ones I've missed."

Bert started counting on his fingers and Dan sighed again.

"Five," Bert said after some deliberation, holding up six fingers.

"Six, you moron," Quinn said from around the end of his blunt.

"Five," Bert said, waggling his thumb. "This time I only _thought_ it was poop."

"… it wasn't poop?" Quinn took a long, slow pull on the blunt and raised his eyebrows as Bert started laughing.

"GUYS," Dan snapped, to no avail, or at least no intelligible response. Jepha, however, or what he was starting to _hope_ was just Jepha, squirmed about a bit and settled again, leaving Dan feeling strangely relaxed.

Bert stuck his finger up his nose so far that Dan thought for a minute that he was trying to mine his own brain for answers. "Okay, I guess it was poop. Or tar. Or furniture polish."

"How do you even confuse poop and furniture polish?" Jepha asked, an amused rumble in Dan's guts that made him feel something like queasy and something like stoned.

"You want me to answer that?" Bert asked, taking the blunt back from Quinn and waving it at Dan's stomach with such determination that Dan slapped his hands to his gut in case a burn looming in his near future, "Or you want a blowback?"

"Um," Dan said, as another squirm nearly unseated him and made his spine all tingly, "How's that going to work?"

"If you get up," Jepha said, and Dan's gut bulged horribly, "I can –" he squirmed again, possibly encouragingly, and Dan's thigh muscles gave a convulsive twitch. Best just to get it over with.

He stood up, very, very conscious of being naked from the waist down (apart from his socks, which were still a little bit pee-soggy on the soles), moreso than he ever normally was, and said, "Now what?"

Quinn, lying on his back with his hands over his face, said in a muffled voice, "Unless you want Bert putting his mouth over your asshole – don't let him, he _bites_ and then you fucking _cry_ every time you shit for like a week afterwards," there was a pause as Quinn re-gathered his thoughts from this particularly traumatising mental cul-de-sac and corralled them towards some sort of point again, "then you should, like, bend and spread so Jepha can get out without falling."

Dan narrowed his eyes. "Or so Bert can shove something _up_ there."

"Oh look who's been in this band more than ten minutes," Bert snickered, taking a good long hit from his blunt and blowing smoke in the general direction of Dan's face. "Want some?"

"Yes," Dan snatched it out of Bert's hand and fitted it to his lips. If anything was going to come slithering out of his ass or, for that matter, getting shoved up there, he wanted to be more relaxed than he currently was. A lot more. Right now his legs were twitching. "And you're not sticking anything up my ass."

"I'm not sticking anything up your ass!" Bert repeated, going off into a train of high-pitched giggles.

"And you're not going to stick anything up my ass either." Dan took a long lungful of weed smoke and nearly choked when Jepha said in a soothing buzz somewhere in his pelvis:

"He's not going to stick anything up your ass because he knows I'll break it off if he tries. Don't you, Bert?"

"I'M NOT STICKING ANYTHING UP HIS ASS," Bert flung himself back onto the cushions and started kicking Quinn. "_You_ go give Jepha a blowback, they don't _trust me_ over there."

"You bite asses," Quinn said, not moving. "That's why no one trusts you. Because you are a –" he started to laugh. "You are a fucking –" he curled up into a ball, wheezing, his hands still plastered over his face. "You are an _ass bite_, a motherfucking ASSBITE."

Dan took another huge and steadying lung of green and waved the blunt vaguely at Bert and Quinn. "Let's get this over with."

"I think I saw porn like this," Quinn said in the boneless, breathy voice of someone who has just exhausted himself laughing.

"I saw your mom in porn like this," Bert retorted, rolling up onto his knees and crawling until he got to Dan's knees. "Don't fucking say it, Jepha."

"Too late," said Jepha's voice from the spongy and stretched confines of Dan's ass, making him feel _incredibly_ weird, "_I did your mom in porn like this_. It needed saying."

"It's not funny the millionth time," Quinn said, the giggles dribbling out of his stoned mouth somewhat contradicting the assertion.

Dan's head was pleasantly fuzzy, but that didn't change the fact that – bending forwards like Bert told him to – the sensation of a couple of long, slimy tentacles slipping out of his ass went beyond _weird_ and into _brain-breakingly freakish_. It didn't help that it was actually kind of … nice, in a sort of … very strange way.

"Jepha?"

"Yep."

"Cool."

Dan decided to leave it at that. Something slippery and curiously adhesive slapped his ass, and coiled up over his lower back, sticking to it. _Like an anchor_, he thought. Another tentacle joined it on the other side, suction cups (he guessed, from hazy memories of aquariums and sushi) attaching themselves to his skin all the way up to his now somewhat sarcastic XXX-edge tattoo.

"'Kay, I'm good, let's have that blunt," Jepha said in a much less indistinct voice. "Uh, Bert, on second thoughts, just _give me the fucking joint_, I don't want a blowback if you're going to head-butt Dan in the balls giving it."

"Thanks for putting that thought in my head," Dan muttered as his balls tried to scramble up into his body cavity on their own at the mere thought.

Bert said, "You're such a bitch. I'm going to bathe you in soy." But he passed the blunt out of Dan's line of sight and there was a satisfied sort of squelch from the region of Dan's … asshole … and …

"I'm not stoned enough for this," Dan said reflectively as another part of his brain stormed out in a snit and refused to talk to him any more.

"You can have some more when I've –" Jepha broke off and a sound like, like, like an octopus in his ass inhaling from a blunt, Dan thought – similes weren't exactly his strong forte – filled the space between his words. "Or I can, I dunno. Take your mind off it. You'll get used to it."

"Which it am I going to be getting used to?" Dan asked woozily, propping himself up on the arm of the chair as he got slowly more and more horizontal, his knees making a dip for the floor. "I feel like my ass is smoking." He started to laugh. "My ass is smoking."

"Aww, don't be upset," Jepha said soothingly, a cloud of pot smoke floating up between Dan's thighs as his knees hit the floor and the laughter began to take a slightly hysterical edge.

"He sounds pretty happy to me," Bert said with total unconcern.

Dan put his forehead against the floor, his elbows on the floor, his hands over the back of his neck, and let his knees slide outwards. "Oh god."

"I know," Quinn muttered from what seemed like miles away. "This is fucking shit-awesome weed." There was a muffled thump. "And he over-packed again. Bert, you fucking –you–" There was a fresh peal of very, very stoned giggling. "You're a bassite. Baitass. Arrrrsebert. Bissaste."

"And you're a pussy-ass lightweight," Bert yawned. There was another thump and more giggling. "OH MY GOD YOUR HAND IS ON MY DICK WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO _NOW_?"

"I'M GOING TO TEAR IT OFF AND THROW IT OUT THE _mmfmfffffffhgghggg_," Quinn shouted, and Dan groaned into the carpet, wondering if he was going to pass out and fall over or just continue sliding until he squashed his balls against the floor.

"Hey," Jepha said quietly, something _else_ sticky and oddly warm tapping Dan in the back of the thigh like a prodding finger, if, you know, prodding fingers had suction cups and were wet. "You want the rest of this? I can't smoke any more or I'll lose my grip."

"On what?" Dan mumbled.

"Everything."

"I don't want any more," Dan groaned, rubbing his face on the floor. He wasn't sure if he meant weed or weirdness, but there had been more than enough of both. He was still, after all, kneeling on the floor of a borrowed house with his naked ass in the air because there was an octopus smoking a joint out of it. That was pretty high on the "weird" scale.

"Hey, are you okay?" Jepha asked in the same subdued voice.

"I have an octopus in my ass," Dan muttered.

"We're still friends, right?" Jepha asked, sounding a little worried now. "I don't want for you to hate me just because I turned out to be something you weren't expecting."

"Now is a bad time for this conversation," Dan yawned. Mostly because words weren't making a whole lot of sense and now the visceral terror of something unknown squirming in his guts had finally passed he was starting to feel really sleepy. Like, exhausted sleepy.

"I know you're pissed at me for being in your ass but you _did_ swallow me before I could explain," Jepha went on, apparently the babbly kind of stoned this time. Normally he just went quiet and pliable … Dan shook his head against the floor. It was kind of hard to process that the quiet and pliable and cute _human_ Jepha he'd kind of half-cradled on his lap those few times was just an elaborate disguise.

"Sorry dude," Dan mumbled.

"S'okay, everything's turned out pretty good," Jepha said cheerfully. "And you have a nice ass. Inside _and_ out. It could be worse."

"My ass is nice?"

"Yeah your ass is nice." Jepha's tentacle – the one over Dan's tattoo – coiled into a new position, the suckers taking a firmer grip on his skin as the muscle flexed and resettled. "Oh my god I am so fucking _high_."

"Oh this isn't _fair_," Dan moaned, not quite sure what was coming out of his mouth exactly, but aware that there was a squishy weight of large octopus resting on his prostate, that he was also unfeasibly stoned, and that it wasn't fucking fair. "I fucking thought you were cute and shit."

There was a brief, or long, or endless silence. Jepha said, finally, "And now you don't because you know I'm … you know?"

"I don't _knooooow_," Dan pushed his face into the carpet again. This was not, on the balance, an excellent idea. It was after all a borrowed band house and the place did not get cleaned anything like as often as, say, the average landfill or dumpster. Bits of fuck knew what were even now getting up his nose and into his stubble. "I don't know I don't know."

"I like _you_," Jepha said wistfully. "You really got a nice ass. I mean, not just your ass. It's just what I can see right now. Your appendix was nice too."

"First time anyone ever told me _that_." Which was at least true.

"Dan."

"What?" He let his hands fall back over the top of his head, mussing his own hair up the wrong way. Did disguises explain feeling Jepha's hair under his fingers? That was going to have to be a question for some time when he wasn't too stoned to do anything but drool into the carpet and shiver, he thought. There was no chance of _understanding_ any answers he might get.

"Can I …" Jepha stopped and a tentacle made a little circle of itself on the inside-back of one of Dan's thighs. "Uh. Can I, like, help you … reconsider. Maybe?"

"You're hanging out of my ass, dude, now is not a time to be coy." Dan shoved his hair over his head the wrong way again. It felt hilarious, but normal. Normal was kind of in short supply, and the freakish thing was the not-normal felt pretty inviting too.

The tentacle peeled off his thigh and stroked the stretched and shivery strip of Dan's no-man's-land with the very tip.

"_Guhfuck_?" Dan managed as all his brain cells tried to shut down at once. "Nmmmmaansnsns?"

The questing tentacle coiled and uncoiled over his ball sack and in a slippery, slimy blink of an eye threw a loop around the base of his dick, which was already and _seriously without reason_ getting a little hard.

"Jesus fucking Christ," Dan turned his head until he could sink his teeth into his own forearm. "Nnggg."

"Is this okay?" Jepha asked.

"Less talk more tentacle," Dan gulped, trying to keep his teeth closed over his muscle before the hysterical laughter could catch up to him along with the rational realisation of what he was actually doing. Getting done. What was happening.

And with that he kind of lost a grip. Which was probably as well; there was no space in his head for dealing with the new and alarmingly _right_ feeling of hundreds of little suckers attaching and detaching in incredible patterns, looped around the length of his dick in a bed of briny lube, stroking and squeeze in waves that owed nothing to hand movements or the feeling of wet pussy or mouth; whole new sensations that coiled and twisted around the green-tinged whorls of his brain to make his thighs shudder and shake.

And then the pressure, the weight on his prostate increased as Jepha shifted himself – probably on fucking purpose – and the waves and waves of tiny suckers clenching and unclenching drove a fucking _ocean_ of jizz right out of the end of his dick.

"NGGREFFF," Dan growled, biting his arm hard enough that it was going to leave some seriously _black_ fucking bruises.

"Hey," Jepha said in that same, quiet, gentle voice. "Do you uh."

"Mm?"

"Do you mind if I, like, finish out the night back up in, uh, your appendix?"

Dan let his face droop against his arm. Right now all he wanted to do was sleep, sleep, and sleep. He didn't care what he had to agree to go get that. "Whatever."

"It's just, I think I'm getting The Fear," Jepha explained, his tentacle slipping off Dan's dick and away through his thighs like the retreat of a tide. "And you know. Warm, dark, wet places are kinda. Comforting. Safe."

"_Whatever_," Dan groaned. "I'm sleeping on my fucking back."


End file.
